There are many types of insurance available, including automobile insurance, property insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and the like. For each type of insurance, insurance companies often offer multiple types of policies that provide varying degrees of coverage. With life insurance, for example, a consumer may purchase a “term life” policy, a “whole life” policy, or a “Universal life” policy. The main difference between the two is the term life policy only lasts a fixed number of years (e.g., 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, etc.), whereas the whole life and Universal life policy can last the lifetime of the consumer.
When purchasing an insurance policy, it is customary to first obtain an estimate of the policy's premium, commonly called a quotation or “quote” for short. In the past, consumers obtained such quotes by contacting the insurance companies or their agents, specifying the type of insurance sought, providing their personal information, and answering a series of insurability questions. For life insurance policies, such insurability questions may include whether the consumer had ever been hospitalized, participated in high-risk activities, and so on. Automobile insurance quotes may require the person answer questions about their driving record, and so on. The insurance companies processed this information and thereafter provided the consumers with a quote for the desired insurance policy. This allowed the consumers to compare quotes from several insurance companies before choosing a particular policy. Unfortunately, the insurability questions asked tended to be numerous, detailed, and often redundant, requiring the consumer to complete multiple pages of questions in many cases.
With the advent of the Internet, the above quote process became immeasurably more convenient. So long as he/she had a computer and Internet access, almost any consumer could obtain a quote for virtually any insurance policy at essentially any time. One simply needed to go to the URL (uniform resource locator) of one of numerous insurance company Web sites, enter the requested information, and the Web site returned a quote almost instantaneously. But while more convenient, the Internet-based quote process was not any less tedious in terms of the number of insurability questions the consumer had to answer. That is, most insurance company Web sites still required the consumer to complete several pages of questions in order to generate the quotes.
In addition, most insurance company Web sites only allow the consumer to obtain a quote for one type of insurance policy at a time. For example, if the consumer wished to obtain a quote for both a term life insurance policy and a whole life insurance policy, he/she needed to go through the quote process separately and sequentially for each policy. Moreover, existing insurance company Web sites only allow the consumer to obtain a quote for one person at a time. Thus, if the consumer wished to obtain a quote for his/her spouse and/or children, he/she needed to go through the quote process separately for each person. Compounding the problem, the consumer typically must manually enter the required information into the Web sites, which can be tedious and time-consuming.
Accordingly, what is needed is a more efficient way to provide consumers with quotes for insurance policies. More specifically, what is needed is a way to allow the consumers to obtain quotes for multiple types of insurance policies and/or for multiple people concurrently.